Today, business rules govern the operation of many business enterprises. Business rules may be created based on government or trade regulations, industry standards, and/or specific policies of the individual business enterprises. Accordingly, business rules may be generally defined as logical statements or instructions defining the actions that must be taken in different commercial situations. For example, a simple business rule for an online vendor may require that for each online sale, a receipt for the transaction must be mailed to the customer. A more complex business rule may set forth the types of review required by a financial institution for transactions of different dollar amounts. Accordingly, the overall operation of a business enterprise may be governed on the basis of hundreds, or even thousands, of business rules. Moreover, as circumstances within a business enterprise change, there may be a need to modify existing business rules or create new ones. Thus, business rules are constantly created and modified by authorized personnel within the business enterprise, such as business analysts, policy committees, application developers, or other business users.
Business users create software applications targeted to the specific needs of a business enterprise. For example, a business user may create a loan-processing software application for a financial institution. Such software applications are often referred to as “rule-based applications.” The business rules are usually stored in a business rule repository. During execution, the rule-based applications may reference the repository to access certain business rules to complete a particular task.
While creating or editing rule-based applications, the business user may reference the business rule repository to identify a business rule suitable for a particular situation. If the business user does not know specific information about the business rule, however, it may be difficult to identify or locate the business rule in the repository. For example, the repository may be organized alphabetically by business rule name, by business rule catalog or ruleset, by enterprise, or in a variety of other ways. Thus, if the business user does not know the particular name of the business rule, the unique ID of the business rule, the catalog or ruleset to which the business rule belongs, the business or enterprise with which the business rule is associated, the folder in the which the business rule is stored, or other information about how the repository is organized, the business user may have a difficult time finding the right business rule for the job. This may result in inefficiencies in the application development process.